Introducing Effective Altruist Profiles
We’re excited to announce EA Profiles, a new community platform for effective altruists. There are already hundreds of profiles for you to browse from members of the community such as Peter Singer and Jeff Kaufman, full of interesting information like people’s favoured causes and charities, and the actions they’re taking to make the world a better place. And you can create your own right now!
The Profiles should serve as a virtual “Who’s Who” of EA—a place to see information about those who identify with effective altruism, and share what we’re doing to inspire and motivate others. They enable applications such as a map of EAs and a cause-neutral registry of past and planned donations, which we’ll cover in a separate announcement.
Your EA Profile provides a natural, standard way to share your identification with the ideas of effective altruism and the ways in which you and people you know can do enormous amounts of good, from spreading these ideas to donating to highly efficient charities. We know that people can be slow or cautious about sharing this, but for familiar reasons think that doing so is highly valuable, spreading and normalising a focus on effectiveness and high impact donations. And making a Profile is a great excuse to do so: you’re sharing this information because we asked for it! You can then point people to it, potentially triggering interesting conversations with friends who might like to hear about the ways they can do the most good.
Many of the Profiles come from answers which people opted to make public in the first annual survey of effective altruists this year (still open if you haven’t taken it yet—it provides another way to create a full or partial Profile). Peter Hurford is currently working on analysing the survey results and will share them and the raw data from the survey soon, but for now the EA Profiles provide some of the most interesting results: public information on the inspiring actions that individuals are taking.
If you’re interested in building up this project, or working on other similar projects, consider looking into .impact, a coordinated volunteer force working on potentially high-impact projects like this one.
Many thanks for help on this project to Joey Savoie, Xio Kikauka, Peter Hurford, George O’Neill and everyone else who pitched in, commented and suggested features :) Thanks also to Pablo Stafforini for creating the original version of the map of EAs, and to Patrick Brinich-Langlois and Sören Mindermann for further help on this.
Also, thanks to Ted Suzman, who I learnt made an earlier version of an EA profiles base at eaprofiles.com (before dropping the project due to lack of time), and has kindly redirected that domain name to our version.
Thanks for your hard work on putting this together! It’s so inspiring to see everyone’s profiles!
I liked that you started by generating profiles from the EA survey. When I got the email about it, it made me feel like I’d been invited to join the site.
Is there any kind of discussion area on the website? I looked for one and couldn’t find it. (I know there are EA forums for this; I was just being a confused user because “community site” implied blog or forum, to me.)
Thanks! We link to the EA forum and Facebook group for discussion as it makes sense to concentrate discussion in a few venues rather than creating a new place for it, for its own sake. The EA forum’s been quite active so far, and the Facebook group recently passed 4,000 members, and seems to have had several threads a day for over a year. (It’s the most successful analogous Facebook group I know of—does anyone know of others, and what features they have?)
The only obvious connection that I can see between a profiles base (of the sort initially outlined in this .impact needs analysis) - and the various other applications of personal data, like the donation registry and map—and a forum is providing more information about the people who post on the latter. But this can be achieved by providing links next to people’s names on both sites, and I’ve already set this up on the EA Profiles and Ryan Carey will do it on the forum.
Does that sound sensible? Can anyone else think of other helpful integrations or synergies?
People may also be interested in Ozzie Gooen’s discussion document on the Advantages and Disadvantages of a Monolith Application. I’m conscious of the disadvantages, and am a believer in decentralisation.
As Niel Bowerman commented there, profiles bases sometime do evolve into monoliths. The ever-growing list of things you can do on Facebook is an example, although that’s partly because Facebook is a platform for independent applications; in the same way, people can build independent applications either on top of the Profiles or leveraging them somewhere else, through .impact.
Well, this is awkward.
I took the survey because of this subthread, and now I find that I have a profile in an effective altruist website.
Oh, what the hell. There are worse websites to have a profile in.
“Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in!”—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=242H7F8DKHA
I’m glad you don’t mind Jaime—I emailed you your login some time before this launch, so you can always delete any info you’ve decided you don’t want to share after all. I assumed that most people who took the EA survey and also opted to make their answers public in the Donation Registry or EA Profiles would be effective altruists, but it’s a good point that they’ll have varying degrees of identification with EA.
[Suggestions thread]
With the seed content from the annual survey, this is the largest platform for individual EAs (well, I guess it’s the only one currently!) So it’s worth thinking about features etc. that could usefully be added to it, or ways others could leverage the open platform.
To get the ball rolling:
It’d be good if EAs could raise fundraiser through these (or EA groups could organise them by leveraging the platform)
You or others could give the EAs on there jumping-off points for actions which make the world a more optimal place in the most efficient way possible.